Why didn’t you reply to my Facebook post?

If you occasionally receive flak from people for not responding to their Facebook posts, having someone get annoyed or upset or insulted that you didn’t take the time to reply to a certain deeply personal or particularly well written update of theirs, you may feel confused. You may well in fact not even remember have seen the post that they got upset about. I for one wouldn’t be surprised if you hadn’t.

This has happened both to me and to a few friends of mine. I won’t go into the reasons why people get their knickers in a twist like that, but I know there are reasons why you’re confused when they do.

Because you don’t see all your friends’ posts. Facebook works by a scoring system which decides what, out of a certain percentage of your friends’ posts, you get to see in your News Feed. Even if you go to their profile, you’ll see more of their updates, but as far as I’ve been able to figure out, not all of them. It’s very likely that the post which they got upset that you didn’t respond to, was among those that Facebook didn’t show you. It wasn’t your fault.